The Middle Ground

by Jeff Ewing

  “Dan’s not home. You’re welcome to wait.”

  She cleared off the glider—brushed away the leaves, smacked the cushions a couple of times. There was nowhere else, really. She certainly didn’t want him going inside the house.

  “All right,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Paramus sniffed at the his ankles, then scurried off to pee on the brown fringe of the lawn.

  “Can I get you a biscuit?” she asked.

  “A what?”

  “Sorry, a cookie or something?”

  “No thanks. I’m good.”

  A number of responses presented themselves, but thankfully they all stayed inside, rattling around among the crates and steamer trunks piled in the corners of her brain. What a clutter it was up there! She shook her head. A little hair fell loose; she tucked it back into place.

  “You like gardening?” the man asked.

  “I do.”

  “You must have a green thumb.”

  She paused, took a breath, pushed a mental armoire back against the wall.

  “It’s at a sort of in-between stage right now.”

  “No, it looks nice. Well-tended.”

  She was proud for a moment, but only a moment, before a troubling image presented itself of her smiling into the camera at JC Penney, her green thumb raised, surrounded by a loving family of carrots and zucchini.

  “It’s not all I do,” she said.

  “I’m sure it isn’t.”

  “Really.”

  “I believe you,” he said, laughing and lifting a stray strand of hair from his forehead with two long fingers.

  She’d never really understood laughter, the pleasure of it. If it was aimless, harmless—okay, maybe. But it never was, it was always leveled squarely at her. Once in a while at Dan, but he never seemed to notice or to mind.

  “Something to drink,” she said.

  Not a question, so no need to wait for an answer.

  Working around the dishes and seedlings in the sink, she plopped a can of lemonade into a pitcher and buried the can deep in the garbage. Beneath a bag of onions she found a shriveled lemon, cut it open and squirted a few seeds into the pitcher. As she passed back through the house, she saw the shabby rooms through his eyes—the unremarkable home of unremarkable people. She’d definitely keep him outside.

  She set the pitcher on the little table, along with the small tray and glasses she carried like a waitress in her other hand.

  “Wow, lemonade? You didn’t have to do that.”

  “It’s no problem,” she said. “It’s that time of day.”

  She had no idea what that meant, but he smiled so she let it stand. What an unusual day it was turning out to be! Her visitor sipped his lemonade. She poured herself a glass and sipped it too, slurping a little around the ice cubes.

  He smiled again. It was a very nice smile.

  “Will your guy be here soon?” he asked.

  “My … ?”

  “I mean, if you have one.”

  What in the world was he getting at, some kind of orgy? He didn’t seem the type, but who could tell.

  “I’m single.”

  He looked at her blankly for a moment, until a light went on. He set the glass down awkwardly on the table, and a little lemonade sloshed over the side.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

  She recognized his discomfort and felt a stirring camaraderie.

  “It’s not your fault. Dan likes to do this, put people in uncomfortable situations.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “You get used to it. He’s been doing it since we were kids—setting up little ambushes, catching me off guard. I’m sure there’s a term for it, but I don’t know what it is. Something pathological.”

  He laughed, and it wasn’t so bad this time. They sipped their lemonade. The sun fell in bands through the pecan leaves onto the table, onto her hands and across his suit jacket. She could smell the fresh-turned soil in the garden.

  Then Dan was there in the doorway, one foot pushing the slider aside.

  “What a pretty little scene! Cinderella and Prince Charming.”

  She tried to think if it was Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty who’d married Prince Charming. She knew if she asked which it was—or, worse, corrected him—he’d find some way to mock her with it.

  “You haven’t talked to her,” their visitor said.

  Dan clicked his tongue and sat on the glider, patted him on the leg.

  “You’ve been gossiping.”

  “We’ve been having a nice time,” Nora said.

  “No one has a nice time with a lawyer.”

  “Well I did.”

  Dan picked up one of the lemonade glasses and ran it across his forehead. Like Vivien Leigh or someone.

  “They are paid to charm,” he said. “Like hookers.”

  He was in full brat mode, the jealous little boy again. Nora was tempted to call him out on it right there, but what would their guest think? Victim and tormentor would change places, just like that. So instead, she yanked the glass from his hand, clattered it onto the tray with hers.

  “Don’t hurry off on my account, Cinder.”

  Their visitor fidgeted.

  “Dan,” he said, scolding.

  “Oh don’t worry about her, Steven. She’s tougher than both of us.”

  Which was true. Or used to be.

  Dan was crying again. Dan was always crying. He wanted his mother, but his mother was gone. There was only Nora. He didn’t seem to consider that she might want her mother too.

  “He’s a complainer, isn’t he?” Dad said.

  “I don’t know what he wants.”

  “Nobody does.”

  Dad drank the glass of water she’d brought to wash down his heart medicine.

  “He’s a sensitive boy. That doesn’t worry me so much. But the sensitive ones, when they make it through … they can turn hard later.”

  He handed the empty glass back to Nora and turned the band saw on again to drown Dan out, cocooning himself in sawdust and noise. Well, who could blame him? He was in over his head.

  She made some chocolate milk for Dan. Thirteen and still drinking chocolate milk. He took it from her without looking up.

  “Those assholes,” he said between gulped sobs.

  “I know.”

  “Fucking Neanderthals!”

  “You’re better than them. They’ll see it eventually.”

  “But when? I can’t do this forever.”

  “High school will be different.”

  Of course she knew it wouldn’t be; or if it was, it would only be worse. Dan wasn’t looking for truth from her, she knew that. He didn’t want anything to do with it.

  “I’ll take you tomorrow,” she said.

  “Could you?”

  “Sure.”

  He settled down eventually, went soft and rubbery in front of the TV. She made dinner and they all ate in the living room. Nobody spoke, except on the screen, sitcom families making it through their hilarious, enviable problems.

  Before she went to bed, she stood in front of the mirror in just her underwear. She couldn’t see her head, the mirror was too short. She was like a grotesque beheaded statue. She swelled out along the sides too, overflowing the edges. Dan laughed sometimes, on his meaner days, at how she couldn’t fit in the mirror. If it was a door, he said, she’d get stuck.

  But it wasn’t a door, despite what all those childhood books had implied. There was no way from here into some bright, enchanted world. She looked at her rounded football shoulders, the rolls drooping over her hips. Even if it was a door, what good would that do? Wherever you went, you had to take you along.

  She could smell herself under the covers. Thick and moldy like the garden. She slid her hand under the band of her panties, ran her finger roughly along the turned furrow, and fell asleep to the sound of her own blubbering.

  The next day she pushed two eighth graders into the fence so hard the chain link left d
iamond impressions on their faces. They’d leave Dan alone for a little while, but it was only a temporary fix. She knew that, even if it never seemed to get through to Dan. He stood behind her the whole time laughing that thin, cutting laugh that struck her as something feral, the chittering of a weak animal hidden safely somewhere while the real animals went about their hard business.

  The two boys bounced like Raggedy Andys from the fence, but they didn’t cry. Even under their fear, she could see their scorn and hate, could hear the jokes at her expense waiting to be made at lunch.

  “Who’s the faggot now?” she growled. “Who’s the faggot now?”

  It was rhetorical; neither one answered. They just bounced and bounced and waited for it to be over with.

  “We’re too old to be living like this,” Dan said. “The two of us in this place. We’re not kids anymore.”

  Nora had been trying for some time to put her finger on when he’d changed, when he’d turned from a puppy into a nasty, snarling dog. Standing at the edge of the garden with the sting of sweat working into her cracked hands, the possibility occurred to her that he hadn’t changed, that that was the problem—neither of them had.

  “What, are you going to move in with Steven?” she said.

  Dan sniffed, his chin against his chest. “A little too soon for that.”

  Nora watched him closely. Was he going to cry now, or turn on her again?

  “I feel like I’m floating out on the ocean or something,” he said, “and the land’s getting farther and farther away.”

  “I’ve never seen you go in the ocean. You hardly go in the pool.”

  “It’s a metaphor, goddammit.”

  “Well it’s a stupid one, it’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “God!”

  He flopped onto the glider and pushed it into motion. His arms were crossed now, his chin still tucked in. She tried to ignore him, the angry squeak of the glider and his breath whistling out of his nose in counterpoint. Every time they tried to get somewhere, they ended up here. Stuck. It would be up to her, of course, to get them unstuck.

  “I can ask around,” she said. “I might be able to find a place. I know a couple of people.”

  The glider squeaked to a stop.

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Probably.”

  She went back to digging.

  “Nora.” Softer now.

  She didn’t turn around, she didn’t want to look at him right then. Knowing, maybe, that he’d be smiling.

  Dad was in the garage as usual when he died, crumpled to the floor of his shop with the table saw still running. He’d been working on what he called his Masterpiece for as long as Nora could remember. It filled most of the garage, pushing everything else aside.

  “We have to finish it,” Nora said, Dad in his urn on the driveway beside her.

  “How?” Dan said. “What even is it?”

  “It’s his Masterpiece.”

  “Well yeah. But what’s it supposed to be?”

  Nora studied it, its underlying skeleton of 1x4s overlaid with roughly bent panels of plywood. Parallel channels disappeared into the far shadows of the garage, branching wildly and unpredictably. Arms spiraled up into the rafters and in between the legs of castoff furniture exiled here by their mother. You could see the calendar of their childhood in the wood—from the newer, pale pine closest to them, back through wasted months and years to the first gray, dimpled planks sagging by the side door. His life—and theirs—laid out.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dan said. “What a joke.”

  She slapped him for the first and only time in their lives, hard. The slap echoed in the shop.

  “He had something in mind. It would have been amazing,” she said.

  Dan whimpered and kicked a strut out from underneath the structure, causing a four-foot section to sink down onto its knees. Nora let him be this time. He ran up to his room and stayed there for the last two days of vacation before heading back for his final year of college. She suspected he never really got over the slap, that it was the gestating act of the paperwork sitting inside the house right now waiting for her signature. His slow-cooked revenge.

  After he’d left, she followed the line of ramps and troughs through the shop, studied its joints and angles. At one point, as she leaned into a chute, she saw her name lightly carved into the wood. NORA in jagged capitals, nothing more. He’d been thinking of her at least, at one point. Was she supposed to understand something just by seeing her name here, carved by his hand?

  She dug through the workbench drawers and inside the tool chest for the master plan she was sure existed. A set of blueprints, diagrams detailing the thing’s function and ultimate shape. But all she could find was a secreted pack of Marlboros and a couple of Playboys from the 1980s. A quaint collection. No key to his vision in full flower. She decided she’d never know; it was like trying to piece a dinosaur together from a single bone.

  It was dark when she left the shop and closed the door behind her. She hadn’t gone in again until now, almost ten years later. It looked even more forlorn, with the door open and sunlight playing along the new cracks and the black patches of mold on the undersides. She found her name, ran her fingers across the letters. She closed her eyes to see if she’d be able to make it out if she was blind, or if it would just be gibberish.

  Poor Dad, she thought. But she wished he’d helped her along a little more.

  She planted her hands on either side of the sink, little sparks going off just under her scalp. She took down the tin cup she kept on a nail by the window and filled it with tap water. It tasted like rust, but she drank it anyway. Out on the glider, Dan and Steven leaned close together. Steven pulled a folded paper out of his pocket like a magician and set it in Dan’s hand. Dan kissed him again and laid the paper between them.

  She reached across the counter and cranked the window partway open, breathed in a big lungful of air. Steven and Dan were laughing—well, Dan was. Steven was only smiling, a halfhearted smile she was familiar with, the kind you fight to hang on to against a steadily creeping discomfort.

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” Dan was saying. “It’s what she needs.”

  The smile was struggling harder.

  “There are other ways, you know. Like talking.”

  “Nah, that never works.”

  “It does for most people.”

  “Nora’s not most people. She’s like a St. Bernard—you have to rub her tummy and let her take the medicine on her own.”

  It wasn’t out of character for Dan, or even especially hurtful, compared to other things he’d said over the years. But it shattered the afternoon nonetheless. She saw fairies and unicorns falling from the shimmering sky, a dung-spattered pig rooting through her garden.

  She blinked and swallowed. She tasted the metal of the cup on her lip, felt it on her teeth. It was all so coincidental, she and Dan being related. The fact was they’d been thrown together like survivors from some distant wreck, bickering ever since across a floundering raft without once giving thought to what sank the ship in the first place.

  When she didn’t come back out, Steven came looking for her. Wearing the same half-assed smile, which retreated for good when the tin cup glanced off his shoulder and slammed into the wall, leaving a misshapen stain on his jacket. He gawked at it with a dismay that had no legitimate business there.

  All sorts of plants were poisonous in some respect, could be ground or baked or mixed for a little surprise for little brother. She had a book inside the house listing all the effects, accompanied by sketches of cartoon people in various degrees of distress. She pulled a dandelion up by the roots and tossed it onto the pile.

  “It was your idea,” Dan said.

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Of course you have. As usual.”

  “What?”

  “You make the decisions, you call the shots. What do you think that’s like for me?”

  “I have no idea.”
r />   “No, you don’t. It’s you and dad still. The son he never had.”

  She sank the trowel deeper into the soil, pressed as hard as she could until it was halfway in to the handle. Then she gave it a sharp twist. She imagined something snapping, a neck or a leg.

  “If you had a job—” Dan was saying behind her.

  She turned and wiped her hands on her apron. Stood and set them on her hips, elbows out and sharp.

  “I have a job.”

  He looked past her at the garden. “That’s not a job. That’s a hobby.”

  But, of course, it wasn’t the garden she meant. Dan was the job, as he always had been.

  “It’s my house too.”

  “Look, it’s only reasonable that the worker gets the say.”

  “You sound like a communist.”

  “Please.”

  “You’re the red menace.”

  “Jesus,” blowing the persimmon hair from his eyes in exaggerated exasperation. “You and your hilarious hyperbole.”

  Did it bother him that he was such a cliché? Probably not. This parody was an easy role; being him was a little too fraught.

  “It’s not like I’m turning you out on the street. You can get a nice apartment for what I’m giving you.”

  “What you’re giving me?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not yours to give.”

  He pulled the paper out of his pocket as if it pained him. As if it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

  “It’s time, Nor.”

  Paramus was sniffing the cuffs of his slacks. Nora hoped he’d lift a leg and let loose. Dan pushed him away roughly, almost kicking him.

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  “Train him then. Teach him some manners.”

  “I could do you both at the same time.”

  He let out another little exhausted sigh.

  “We’ll talk when you’re reasonable. I didn’t think you’d take it like this.”

  “Then you don’t know me.”

  “I guess not.”

  “You really should by now.”

  The demure horn of Steven’s Prius peeped out front. She took the paper and tossed it on the ground by the cucumbers. QUIT CLAIM in bold letters, like an advertisement for something nobody wanted.